The Cottage Industry

Three decades ago, I visited the man who was about to publish my first book and he grumbled about the end of publishing "houses." He looked down the road and saw small houses folding and he thought the big houses were not far behind. To stay alive, he had sold his own house to Delacorte Press and he thought the whole industry was a house of cards.

I had just come from a local Borders, on Fifth Avenue, and I reported the aisles were crowded with shoppers and there were lines at the cash registers. This news seemed to cheer him, and I wondered why he hadn't ventured out into Manhattan and done a little market research of his own--but that was only one of many questions into a complexity.

The editor who chose my book out of the slush pile of submitted manuscripts told me not to get too excited, as every author does at the prospect of seeing his book come to print. "It will be a horrible experience," he warned. But I didn't pay him much mind--I had got to know him as a glass half empty type.

He proved to be prescient, of course. The publisher insisted on a bodice ripper cover for my black little tale and the book went nowhere, although a lucky book club deal made me enough money to buy my first house, so I could not get much sympathy.

I did get to see a different world, and that was worthwhile. I got to wander through the Convention Center in downtown Washington, DC where the publisher had my book in it's area for the American Booksellers Association convention. And that was, to put it mildly, a shock. It was like that scene in Gone With The Wind, where Scarlett O'Hara, always self absorbed, goes to the Atlanta railroad yard to find the doctor to rescue Melanie Wilkes, who is in desperate labor trying to deliver a baby at home. As Scarlett picks her way among the Civil War casualties the camera moves back and you gradually see the full scope of her dilemma--the yard is enormous, at least 10 football fields, and filled, shoulder to shoulder with the wounded and dying, and when Scarlett finally locates the doctor and tries to pull him away to come help deliver Melanie, he waves at all those around him and says, "Do you really think I can take time to help one woman, when I have all these to care for?"

And that was the booksellers' convention--fifty thousand books competing with mine for an audience, so many voices and why should any one take the time to notice mine?

That's when I realized the role of the publisher, which until then, for me, had been to select the meritorious work from all the eager but inept efforts of would be writers, the role was actually not simply the selection, but the advocacy for the book. In fact, the publisher might select A Farewell to Arms from all the tripe, but if the book was not put in the spotlight, nobody would ever know about this wonderful book, with its spectacular, unforgettable opening paragraph.

From my worm's eye view, I saw a multitude of people working in the publishing industry, from publicists to editors to CEO's to agents who were remarkable for their ineptitude. I found myself thinking, how did these people ever get a job? What industry has this concentration of--I cannot think of a better word--losers?

In my day job, I dealt with a lot of obnoxious, often misguided people, but each was, in his own way, good at what he (or she) did. They had been selected, trained and put to work and their work was evaluated, analyzed and reviewed frequently.

But publishing was the refuge of the feckless.

Eventually, I stopped writing books. I did this for many reasons: After my fifth book failed to hit the best seller lists, I was a toxic property, an author who was a proven failure. That failure belongs to the author, not the publicist, the cover art, the marketing campaign or the lack of it. I could have tried under a nom de plume, but by then I had much more exciting and interesting distractions--two young sons who I had to ignore, if I was going to write, even if I wrote after they went to bed. And I spoke with a number of book authors who had stopped writing for books, saying they wanted to write for an audience of more than 3000 (the typical sale of a typical book) and they were writing for magazines.

I wrote for magazines and discovered they were correct. My first piece, in The Washingtonian, resulted in more phone calls, letters, people stopping me in the hallway, than all of the novels I had published combined.

So, I cannot mourn the loss of Borders, Crown Books, etc nor of MacMillian, Random House, Farrar Strauss.

There will always be far more writing than reading, far more voices than ears willing to listen.

And I can read the font on my ebooks without my glasses.

Taxes and the One Percent

James Stewart, writing in the New York Times (Saturday, 1/28/12)
makes tax code arcana revelatory.

For most of my adult career, I was self employed, an employer, and lived in Maryland, which had state and county taxes. Every year, I tried a different scheme to salt away enough money in specifically designated "tax accounts" so when April 15th arrived, I could write those $30,000 checks to the IRS, the state etc.
And every year, no matter how much income my business had generated, I was wiped out, down to almost nothing, my accounts "nuked."

I felt poor.

The problem is, it turns out, I had the wrong sort of income.

If my income had come from capital gains (from stock or bond investments) or from "carried interest" (whatever that may be--rich people would know) or had it come from tax free municipal bonds, or been salted away in accounts in the Cayman islands or Switzerland, I would have lived well without having been laid low every April.

But, like Mr. Stewart who paid 24% of his "adjusted gross income" in federal taxes, and 37% in combined federal and state and local taxes, I found I was actually paying much higher percentage of "taxable income" --49% in federal income tax for Mr. Stewart and 74% of the "taxable income" when you combine the federal, state and local taxes and throw in the "self employment tax" and I always got hit with the dreaded "minimal alternative tax."

I always had the feeling I was missing legitimate deductions.

Friends drove huge Ford Expeditions and Cadillac SUV's, and I wondered how they could afford them--and they told me there was some huge write off for oversized vehicles which qualified as trucks.

Now that I am an employee, I do not pay alternative minimal tax, self employment tax, and because I live in New Hampshire, no state income tax.

I may be living in a fool's paradise, but I feel rich.

But I wonder, why is it I was penalized by my government when I was a "job creator?" I was self employed, which meant I needed to employ others, and yet I was penalized with a "self employment tax." What was that all about? My wife suggested this was like the wife slapping her husband when he goes out the door in the morning, not for something she knew he had done but for the things she knew he did she didn't know about. "The presumption is, if you are self employed and reporting your own income, you are cheating."

The presumption was, if you are self employed, you are deducting things which are bogus, and since we cannot find out exactly how you are cheating, we'll just slap you on principle, knowing you will abuse the system when we are not looking. Or something. My best guess. Can't really know what they were thinking with the self employment tax or who was doing the thinking.

But, I paid my taxes, every cent, without ever looking for a slick deduction, and I told myself, well, this is the real patriotism. None of this cheap patriotism wearing an American flag lapel pin, or pasting an American flag on my bumper. I did the hard thing, made the real sacrifice. I paid every cent I owed in taxes.

But the guy who was rich enough to plunk down his money in "investments" and could live off the "carried interest" or "capital gains" well, his government didn't ask him for that kind of sacrifice.

What was he doing that meant his government was not asking him to sacrifice?

It's not like he was in a combat zone, dodging Improvise Explosive Devices.

I was a patriotic, making my sacrifice every April 15th.

But like the dog faced soldier who was sleeping in foxholes and taking incoming rounds, I knew there was some general somewhere, sleeping indoors, more than likely comforted by a pretty young female aide.

Welcome to the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, where liberty reigns supreme and we have a government of the people, by the people for the people.

Just Answer Yes or No

Consider a pack of jackasses. Now, consider Congress. But then, I repeat myself.

--Mark Twain

Watching C span, the Congressional hearing during which Republican Congressmen pilloried some poor assistant secretary of State , who had the misfortune to be involved with reviewing the Canadian pipeline application, and you get to see how clearly our representative form of government actually represents our people. Well, maybe not our people, but how the Congressman represents whomever is paying him.

His name is tragically lost to me, but a very well groomed, young, handsome Republican Congressman went at the assistant secretary, very self confidently, because he knew he was about to prove to the world just how brilliant he really is.

"Now, secretary, tell me if the highest priority of this administration is jobs: Yes or No."

The secretary, whose job has nothing to do with knowing what the highest priority of the administration may be, started to say something to that effect and the fresh faced Congressman cut her off, "Just yes or no."

And then he continued. "And just tell me, yes or no, whether cutting off this pipeline would cost this country 2,000 jobs. Yes or no?"

The secretary began saying something to the effect of the job of her department was to review what the total effect on relations with Canada, the costs and benefits to the United States might be, but the Congressman closed in for his great triumphant moment, "Just yes or no."

Which made me wonder, where did this "Just yes or no," thing come from?

If you invite someone to testify, are you not always doing so on the premise the person you are interrogating gets to answer the question in his or her own words? Otherwise, why have that person present in the room at all, if you are going to both ask the question and answer the question yourself, in your own words.

Of course, in these circuses called hearings, the Congressmen really are not there to learn anything, but simply to proclaim how individually superior they are, how powerful, what great spokesmen for whomever is paying them to champion their cause. They often dispense with any effort to ask a question simply make grandiose, emotional and ego gratifying speeches.

As this Congressman grew tumescent over his own prowess, the white haired lady from the State Department, leaned back in her chair, away from the microphone and tried to look as if she was listening, smiling faintly at the jackass in front of her, knowing she need not respond because she was not being asked to respond.

She was simply there as a prop.

Moneyball and the Search For Talent

Just saw Moneyball, the movie, last night.

A wonderful adaptation of a wonderful book.

The movie is astonishing on several levels. One of the most amazing things about it is how scrupulously it avoids the gooey sentimental scenes which would have inevitably been there if Steven Spielberg had anything to do with it. The closest it comes is where Billy Bean asks his daughter to sing him a song in a guitar store and there is some subtle background applause, but even this is handled with a light touch.

A really remarkable film, but this post is not about how good this very good movie is...it's about the underlying theme: How difficult it is to identify talent and how poorly our institutions do it.

Most of us have had the experience of being selected against in both inconsequential and in important ways: We have been not selected for the basketball team or for the prestigious college.

And we smarted, because we thought we knew better. We thought more of ourselves than those who judged us did.

And we may have been correct.

Those who have benefited from the system, whatever system it is, tend to be its most ardent supporters because they have benefited.

So those who have the sort of intelligence which allows them to score high on the SAT know for sure these tests select only the most worthy and also select against the unworthy.

On the other hand, when we were in high school, we thought we could recognize the really bright kids and we knew the SAT missed some really bright people. Those who scored high sometimes surprised us, but it was unusual to say, "That guy is an idiot: How did he do so well?"

But we all knew the screening instruments and processes missed some of the best people.

The girl I took to the senior prom I knew was one of the brightest people at my high school--and we had some really bright people. But she did not do particularly well on the SAT and did not get into the top tier colleges. She went to Carnegie Tech, where she spent a year and transferred to Barnard and then worked her way into Columbia Law School.

Her early defeats, the way she was dismissed by the adult judges of her talents, lit a fire within her which burned bright and hot and drove her and she went to the West Coast, where she became a lawyer for movie companies whose names you would know and she kept moving up and up until she became a partner in one of the worlds richest financial institutions. She is now richer than probably the entire senior class of our high school. When she comes to town, she typically asks out a dozen of her best friends from high school--kids whose SAT scores catapulted them right to Harvard/Yale/Princeton right out of high school, and she takes everyone out to a great restaurant and the bill never arrives.

She told me a story about a classmate of ours who showed up at her office in San Francisco and got past the usual sentries and insisted she come down to the street, where he had his Corvette. He had become a successful liability lawyer and now owned a Vette and a vineyard and he was trying to show her what a success he had become.

Now this particular guy was reasonably bright, but a bad boy and outcast in high school--he dropped out briefly, came back but had not done well enough to go to college (a rarity at that high school) went into the Navy--submarines--and gradually worked his way back, through college, then law school at American University, an un selective college in Washington, DC. But he had earned lot of money and he wanted to show this woman he had arrived, had finally made it, had proven he was smarter and more talented than anyone in high school would have thought. He was saying, I'm now a winner. I belong in the same class as all you guys who thought I was a loser.

Of course, he picked exactly the wrong lady to try to impress.

I'm sure she was polite and never let on how pathetic she thought this display was.

But these are familiar stories--the rise from the bottom to a better more exalted place. (Increasingly rare in this country.)

What is so unusual about the Billy Bean story is it is the story of someone who was selected as having a world of talent, a bright future and he failed miserably.

This is not unusual in baseball, because as the scouts say, there is magic in the world of baseball. There are legions of bright looking prospects who do not succeed in baseball. Billy Bean was merely one of the brightest, a boy who was strong in every department, who, if not a can't miss talent, was at least most likely to succeed.

And he could not hit big league pitching.

Most people to whom this happens, slink off into the shadows and do nothing with that failure. No fires burn bright and hot within. They are simply defeated and wind up selling sports equipment at Dicks.

But Billy Bean was that rare bird who asked "Why?" How could the scouts who showed up at his home offering singing bonuses and persuading his parents to allow him to skip Stanford, how could they have been so wrong? Is it possible, he asked himself, these scouts were clueless? Did they simply not know what they were doing? Did their little tests of potential really mean nothing?

At the group try out, Billy Bean had run faster, hit the ball farther, harder, jumped higher than anyone, but the guys he beat ultimately went on to stellar, some hall of fame careers.

And Bean asked the next question: If these scouts were so bad at predicting success, is it possible they were equally bad at predicting failure?

Likely, scouts are correct some of the time. But we rarely have a controlled experiment. How many times does a team of rejects get assembled to challenge those who were chosen?

Because of the asymmetry in baseball, because there are rich teams who can buy the best prospects and poor teams, who have to settle for the rejected, we have something of a control group.

It was the control group Billy Bean managed to assemble. And with the help of a variety of new metrics, he was able to do it with more than random prospects.

In the 1960's, the only test of intellectual brilliance was the SAT. Now, there is one alternative test, the ACT, and some students who do poorly on the SAT do well on the ACT.

I know at least one student who was told he would not be recruited at Harvard, after his SAT score proved inadequate. He took his ACT and did well and his letter of acceptance, early decision was hand delivered by the coach who had previously told him he was simply not smart enough to survive at Harvard.

I wonder, if we had not just two tests of intellect, if we had a battery of tests, what the chosen people at Harvard would look like?

Clearly, the current system has worked for Harvard, as evidenced by the fact Harvard selected both Bill Gates and the guy who did Face Book. True, they both realized Harvard was not fertile enough soil to nourish their genius, and left, but somehow Harvard figured out they were gifted in the first place.

MIT is filled with smart people who do succeed.

So systems of choosing the talented work for some percentage--but what of those selected against? Is there a rich lode of talent out there being wasted?

And if there is, how much justice is there in the American Pie, which is eaten up by those in the top 1% while the other 99% languishes?

Urinating on Sanctimony

Abu Gharib: Now that was bad press. Those guys were still alive.

sanc·ti·mo·ni·ous

   [sangk-tuh-moh-nee-uhs] Show IPA

adjective

1.

making a hypocritical show of religious devotion, piety,righteousness, etc.: They resented his sanctimoniouscomments on immorality in America.

2.

Obsolete . holy; sacred.

I have never been to war.

I have never, most especially been to an asymmetrical war, like Viet Nam, where one side has a vast superiority of firepower and numbers, which drives the other side to stealth and blind sided hits, and, in the current war in Afghanistan, to remotely triggered explosive devices, so as a soldier you are hit without ever having seen your enemy.

The Taliban, no doubt, feels the same way about drone attacks as our troops feel about IEP's.

I can only imagine, if you are face to face with your enemy, it is a slightly different experience than our current modes of guerrilla war. But I am just guessing.

But I do not have to guess about some things.

We have now embarked on a course of endless war. The war on terrorism, Bush called it.

This is a whole new concept. As Carver said about the war on drugs, in The Wire, "You can't even call this war. Wars end."

But we are now engaged in endless war, against an indistinct enemy, whose motives are not clear and whose objectives even less, other than to kill our soldiers.

And who are our soldiers?

There may have been some who enlisted like Pat Tighlman, after 9/11, to "fight" the "terrorists."

But that was a decade ago. What has evolved now is our army is, in Bob Dylan's words from the 1960's, "Join the army, if you fail."

Which is not to say our arm forces are comprised of losers. But, think of it this way, what percentage of our arm forces would be doing this work if they had a better way of earning a living?

I think I heard your answer. Less than 10%, and after one tour, if they had the money, most soldiers would never return.

There is nothing new about mercenaries. The British hired them to fight American colonists, who were no match for their military training and firepower. But the colonists won because they got aid from the French, because John Adams and Franklin and Jefferson were able to play the geopolitical game. And they won, because the colonists were still going to be in America, when the hired guns had gone home.

Taliban, according to a friend who returned from Afghanistan, have a lovely technique of arriving at a school for girl and beheading the teacher in front of his 8 year old students, as a way of expressing the Taliban disapproval of educating women.

American marines, learning this, one might imagine, would not react dispassionately.

But we call the current armed forces, "Professional." Which is a gussied up way of saying they are doing it for the money, and they are well trained and well equipped.

But what are their motivations, that is, what is going on in their minds?

The current army, navy and marine "professionals" (aka mercenaries) must know what they are doing is more like what the police do. They can try to kill "bad guys," i.e. people who mean to do violence, but they must have no illusions they can do any more to prevent the next attack than a policeman can do to prevent the next bank robbery, mugging or rape.

Which brings me to the word "sanctimony," which is what we saw from Hiliary Clinton, the head of the Marine Corps, Leon Panetta, and various senators and congressmen, all of whom saw videos of marines urinating on dead Taliban as a marketing disaster.

Oh, very bad marines.

You can kill people, but you cannot urinate on them.

Urinating on dead bodies is a statement. We here up in the higher echelons of the government are the only people allowed to make statements.

You just get to kill people.

When you start making statements, that's immoral, hideous, un American and very bad press.

You don't have to have been to war to understand how those marines must have felt. You only have to have watched The Wire, to understand the gap between the troops in the trenches and the brass who are safe and warm in their wood paneled offices.

Of course, the Obama administration is no worse in this respect than the Bush administration. As bureaucrats, they have no choice but to say the expected words and to get all sanctimonious, to sustain the fantasy we are killing people in Afghanistan to "kill the bad guys," who would otherwise get on jets and kill Americans here in the USA.

As if the Taliban cannot afford to buy a few tickets to New York.

Better to fight them over there than over here.

Isn't that just so American? Dream up some catchy phrase that cannot hold up to scrutiny and send your sons and daughters to die for it.

Actually, don't send your sons and daughters. Send the sons and daughters of the people whose sons and daughters cannot find a better job than killing people in Afghanistan.

Cocksure

The trouble with the world, Bertrand Russell once observed, is the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.

Who wins the crown for king of cocksure? Rush Limbaugh, no doubt.

He has stiff competition form Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and from Newt and Rick Santorum and, of course, Mitt Romney, but Rush is king.

The Bible thumper is always cocksure. After all, God speaks to him. It's part of the package, knowing for sure.

Cocksure is what the Republican Party has parlayed into success. Confidence, being sure of what you say.

It's the stock and trade of marketing. Nuance, acknowledging the opposing point of view are not part of cocksure.

It's not that Republican marketers are thoughtless--they are the Madmen of the 21st century, sitting around an office, a bar or a boardroom, thoughtfully creating something which will appeal. Mitt Romney is the real life Don Draper.

So he's thought about the thrust of the Democratic opposition, who have seized upon the sheer audacity of the skewed distribution of wealth which has occurred, at least in part, in large part, because of Republican laws, rules, deals and ownership of the government. And the Republicans have to answer the Democrats' punches over cutting taxes on millionaires and billionaires.

So what he says is: 1/ You are not poor because somebody else got rich. And there may be some truth to that, if you look at proximate causes. If you look at the inter connectedness of our system, well then, the fact the guy who won the game now has millions to spend means you cannot buy that house you wanted because he's already bought it, knocked it down and built a McMansion. 2/ The whole notion of the underclass identifying themselves as the 99 percenters and the rich as the one percenters is dangerous. You have to say, hey, identify with us one percenters. Republicans have been able to sell Joe Sixpack the fantasy that one day he'll be a one percenter, but the 99 % crowd have been in frontal assault on that dream. So now, what can we rich guys say? We can say greed is good. Just read Ayn Rand. No, Joe Sixpack doesn't read. But he did go to Sunday school once and he he knows envy is a sin, or a bad thing anyway. And he's been told ambition is good.

So, how's this?

Ambition is what makes capitalism work. Envy is what you have in the hearts and minds of the person who wants socialism. When Zhivago arrives at his palatial townhouse in Moscow, home from the war, he finds a woman at the front door who says, "Twelve families live in this house now, where before just one." And Zhivago, seeing his position, says, "Yes, this is much more equitable."

So that's where envy gets you. Someone moves into your house because socialism says everyone should have equal stuff.

Don Draper strikes again. Brilliant.

Mitch McConnell is good at marketing, in the same way. He eats Harry Reid alive, daily.

But there are those who are intelligent, dangerous and effective: Phil Sheridan was cocksure and intelligent.

Of course, he said, "The only good Indians I saw were dead." And that got made into, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

And he did slaughter all the buffalo herds to crush the Plains Indians. And he burned and sacked the Shenandoah Valley. But he was intelligent and effective.

Maybe Obama ought to read a little Sheridan.

A little marketing might help the cause.

Home of the Phony Brave

I keep hearing Republicans from Mitt Romney to John McCain to Mitch McConnell to John Boehner talking about the brave risk takers who drive the American economy with their courage, guys who dare to be great and all that.

Mitt Romney did it as a member of a firm of "Venture Capitalists."

Doesn't that sound daring? Like Viking Capitalist's.

But what did he ever really risk? If the firm had folded, would his family have lost its home and been wandering the streets of Boston?

I ran my own business for 27 years and for every day of that, I thought about what would happen if X happened which could crimp my revenue stream, or if Y happened to jack up my expenses. I was locked into a lease which committed me to paying out $250,000 over the term of the lease, and I had employees, and large phone bills and insurance premiums not to be believed and no company paying into a pension plan--I had to fund my own. And I had to buy my own health insurance and find a plan for my employees. My profit margins were slim and there were always unanticipated expenses and rising costs I could not control.

And when I interviewed for a job, to become an employee, the CEO of the company started grousing about taxes and how Democrats wanted to cut the balls off the drivers of our economy, hit guys like him, a risk taker, a job maker.

And I sat there thinking, "You have been an employee of a huge corporation for 30 years and before that you were in the Marines, again an employee, a government employee for that matter. You don't know what risk is."

Did he ever doubt for a moment that he was a tough guy, a risk taker, a job maker, a swashbuckler?

Where are these guys on Sunday afternoon when the games are played at Lambeau field, in the snow? Home, safe and warm, wearing their store bought jerseys, feeling real brave and heroic.

Have any of these Republican big shots, these Vikings of the 21st century American economy ever had a shot fired in anger at them?

The picture is the bridge between Ohio and Kentucky, built, you can bet, with government money, along which moves a big chunk of commerce all the way from Minnesota to Florida. But the bridge is crumbling and the Republicans don't want to spend government money to upgrade it. The bridge runs into Kentucky, Mitch McConnell's own state, and he won't let the money flow to fix that bridge because, as he freely admits, all he cares about is defeating President Obama. He's safe and warm at home, watching it all from the comfort of his wood paneled office. He's never been out on the field, in the snow.

Is this guy, are any of them, actual patriots? Do they care anything about the people who live across that bridge? Are they not the ultimate phonies?

Afraid New World

Republicans, who have long pilloried Democrats for being spineless, limp wristed elitists, have developed into a party of cry babies, infante terribles, who stamp and spit, "No," to every attempt by government to solve any problem.

They say all you have to do is to allow citizens to play the game by the rules and any man can be as rich as the one percenters.

Of course, this does not happened because the rules make sure the one percenters begin the game on third base, but that's a detail. Whenever you get into the details, the conversation gets tedious and you lose the attention of Joe Sixpack, which is what the Republicans count on.

Another way of figuring out if the game is rigged, is to look not at the individual rules, but on the outcome ensured by those rules: And by this analysis, the rich are now richer and more successful than ever.

But if you really want to see the Republicans for what they are (a horrifying prospect) just look at what some of their stars would do, if elected, according to what they have said in my own state of New Hampshire:

Romney would:

1. Recriminize abortion

2. Seek constitutional amendment outlawing same sex marriage

3. Seek constitutional amendment requiring 2/3 congressional majorities to increase taxes

4. Repeal Obamacare

5. Replace unemployment beneifts with unemployment savings accounts

6. Increase tax cuts for the rich

7. Double Guantanamo

8. Reauthorize torture

9. Deport undocumented aliens en mass.

Santorum would:

1. Reject global warming as junk science.

2. Keep American troops in Afghanistan for "as long as it takes," whatever it is.

3. End all abortion

4. Make contraception illegal on the state level

Paul would:

1. Kill the Federal Reserve system.

2. Put the dollar back on the gold standard.

3. Pull Americans troops back home and keep them here.

4. Eliminate abortion.

5. Kill Medicare, Medicaide and Social Security.

Feel better now?

The Fire Next Door

Here is the view from across the salt marshes of the Seabrook Nuclear plant, which is 2 1/2 miles from my house.

Would I have bought my house if I had known it was there?

Probably. Fact is, I wanted to live on the Seacoast and the Seacoast is only 18 miles long from Massachusetts to Maine. The evacuation radius is 10 miles, which means it stretches from inside Massachusetts to Portsmouth at the Piscataqua River, which is the Maine border.

Of course, as one of my neighbors pointed out, what do you think they do at the Portsmouth Naval Yard in Kittery, across the river? They refit nuclear submarines.

Reminds me of the stump speech Frank Magee, Senator from Wyoming, used to give to schoolkids around the Washington, DC area, in the 1960's, about how he thought he ought to get out of Washington, DC and back to Wyoming, to get away from the coming nuclear Armageddon. Then they built an ICBM missile silo a mile from his ranch. There's just no safe place, he said.

On the other hand, the folks at Fukishima are probably wondering why they placed their faith in experts.

We live with more lies than we live with truth in America. Weyhauser, the tree cutting people, have re branded themselves as the tree planting people because they plant little twigs after they clear cut a mountain in Washington State. But if you've ever driven to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State and gazed upon the wasteland, which looks like some post nuclear apocolypse scene, miles of denuded forests and hills, you know that company, which runs the adds on TV with little deer grazing among the trees the company replanted, if you've ever driven around that peninsula, you know what a lie that commercial is and what a lie the whole marketing of that environmentally destructive company is.

But, then again, this is America, where the makers of Fruit Loops can market their cereal as good for your kids because it has high fiber, never mind the sugar and calories. And, looking back over our history, dating back to the railroads, the robber barons of oil and steel, money has been our only truth, our only real religion.

And, in fact, when you look at religion in America, from Pat Robertson to Rick Santori to Glenn Beck, it's all about commerce--love Jesus, love God and you will get something in return. You'll get your prayers answered, you'll get rich, you'll get eternal bliss. How many of these folks or any of their admirers would go to church or pray if they were told, if they knew for sure God would not answer their prayers or reward them?

Jefferson avoided calling himself a Christian. He is now called a Deist, someone who believes in a creator, who set the world into motion but then stood back and watched and does not interfere, certainly in no one individual's benefit.

In the Iliad, the gods intervened all the time. The Greeks wanted to believe there was help from beyond mortal powers. When you feel powerless, the idea of a fatherly, remote but loving protector is very attractive.

And that is the God we have made for ourselves here. The god of commerce, enterprise, ambition and free markets.

And, in fact, there is a sort of behind the scenes sort of interest from the gods in our fate. Big companies take out Dead Peasant insurance policies on their unsuspecting employees, from Walmart to Bank of America, who die and the company collects a million dollar life insurance policy about which the employee (and certainly the employee's family) never had a clue.

But then again, this is America, where big companies lay waste to mountains in West Virginia and to farmers in the heartland and then they sell the fantasy to the people they've raped that these same people who were raped actually enjoyed the experience.

Nuclear Power on the New Hampshire Seacoast

When I moved back to my home town, Washington, DC, in 1981, my friends (in Connecticut, where I was finishing training) all asked, "Why would you want to live at ground zero?"

The cold war was still on and in the back of many minds was the fear Washington, DC would be evaporated in a nuclear cloud someday.

By the time I moved to New Hampshire, the cold war was over and that fear had receded, although everyone knew some terrorist with a nuclear bomb strapped to his back, a la the movie Peacemaker, could still set off a nuclear bomb in Washington, DC. Moving to New Hampshire, I thought, well, that's at least one less thing for me to worry about--no terrorist is going to target New Hampshire.

Then I discovered my beautiful new house was just 2 1/2 miles from the nuclear power plant at Seabrook/Hampton Falls.

So much for peace of mind.

Then came Fukishima.

Now I have just received in the mail a nifty calendar from the public relations folks at the power plant with all kinds of good advice I'd like to share, about what to do in the event of an accident at the power plant. From the mailing:

1. Go inside and stay there.

Oh, and here I would have thought, get in the car and flee.

2. If you must go outside (for example to bring in a child playing outside) cover your nose and mouth with a folded, damp cloth.

Now, I can understand how this would be effective. But do you think it's important the cloth be folded?

This reminds me of those TV broadcasts from the 1950's showing US Army soldiers being marched out to the test site in the Arizona desert where they set off a nuclear bomb and the mushroom cloud is visible off in the distance and the soldiers are covering their faces with their arms, just as the authorities had trained them to do.

3. Do not use the telephone except for emergencies.

Oh, there is a mushroom plume of radioactive mist rising a mile up from the plant, and when does this constitute an emergency?

4. If you are in your car, close the windows and air vents and turn off the heater or airconditioner. Turn on "recycle air" option if available.

This is because, I presume, the nuclear experts have determined sealing yourself in your car is a good protection against radioactive fall out. Just like those bomb shelters people used to build in the 1950's. If the cars are so good, why did we build all those fall out shelters?

I am very reassured now.

Homer Simpson is alive and well and living in New Hampshire, working at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant.